AK's weblog

Why does one of the monitoring cameras in the subway station Unionkreuzung have to point exactly at the input keyboard of the cash machine there? That makes me kind of nervous.

Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich found out that the mozarella ciabatta from Billa is not quite healthy. I won't buy there anymore, at least for today, as I don't want to get sick due to [[Staphylococcus|Staphylococci]] and [[Enterobacteriaceae]].

I just listened to the classic [[Popcorn (song)|Popcorn]] track by Hot Butter (in case you don't know it, download it from your favorite warez and mp3z P2P network or from here), and IMHO, it's still the best song ever produced in the area of electronic music. What makes it so special is that is not totally perfect -- beside the cracks you hear in the mp3 file I have because it was recorded from vinyl, the synthesizer's sounds are not perfect, they seem to oscillate a bit irregularly. But that might be just an imagination from myself. Nevertheless, no other electronic music track could please me as much as this one. The only other track that came close was "we are the robots" by [[Kraftwerk]], but that's already from the late 70s (IIRC), and Popcorn is from the late 60s. Oh, and the synthesizer music from "A Clockwork Orange" comes close to it, too, but that's not music I would want to listen to during work on a daily basis (and the score is from about the same time as Popcorn). So, anything to recommend that is still available somewhere (where "somewhere" is preferably Amazon)?

Email from George W. Bush.

I just had an ICQ conversation with a former school colleague. It was the type of colleague who tried to convince me that Windows is so much better than Linux because Windows ME boots so much faster than a SuSE installation. Yeah, right.

Anyway, he approached me with "you'd never guess what I'm doing right now", I asked him "what?", and then he told me that he first compiled the kernel, then X.org and now KDE 3.3.1. I asked him why he compiles that stuff all by himself. "Because it makes the binaries better fit my CPU" (a usual Gentoo argument) and "because the FreeBSD ports system is the greatest thing in the world". "What? You're using FreeBSD?!"

"Yes, the ports system is so great and ..." and then he told me how ports works. I told him that he could have the same thing on Gentoo, or on Debian, and even without compiling so much on the latter one (of course, the FreeBSD ports system is not a bad thing, but it's definitely not the best thing since the invention of sliced bread). "Yeah, but Debian is an obscure patchwork!" "What?! Can you give me some examples?"

And then there was silence. Fucking FreeBSD fanboy. No offense to the FreeBSD developers who read this blog ;-), but you definitely don't deserve those kind of "fans". Some of them just don't understand that only bad systems require advocates, and whatever they're advocating, they're not doing anything good to it.

On this picture you can see the tomato-mozzarella ciabatta that I had for lunch today. I bought it at Billa Gourmet for only EUR 2,19 and it was *yummy*, of course. But what I absolutely hate about the sandwiches from Billa Gourmet is that there is way too much inside. I wish they put in less tomatoes and mozzarella than they usually do.

Awful plastic surgery. The horror.

Niko called Firefox a "hyped" browser. IMHO, Firefox is currently the best free browser around, especially due to the high number of great extensions that are available. This is an (incomplete) list of my favorite Firefox extensions:

• Web Developer Toolbar: the web developer's swiss knife with integrated chainsaw, shotgun, and towline. Disable Java, Javascript, CSS at a fingertip, edit CSS on the fly, get information about the last HTTP request, find broken images, outline frames, table cells, images, deprecated tags, validate the current page's HTML, CSS, and Section 508 and WAI accessibility on the fly, resize the browser window to a certain size (useful for checking pages for problems with low resolution screens), and many more features.
• User Agent Switcher: useful for switching the browser's user agent string.
• WML Browser: WML pages aren't shown as XML source anymore, but as real pages instead. Very useful when you do WAP development, especially in combination with the User Agent Switcher.
• Smooth Wheel: fixes an annoying misfeature in Firefox, that is the not so smooth scrolling when you use the mouse wheel.
• BugMeNot extensions: integrates bugmenot.com into Firefox. Very nice if you have mandatory registration pages.
• Linkification: Allows Firefox to view plain-text URLs and e-mail addresses as actual links
• SwitchProxy: allows you to save multiple proxy settings and switch between them quickly and easily. Especially useful when you quickly have to switch between a "Zwangsproxy" and [[de:Java_Anon_Proxy|JAP]].

Yesterday I did something that I haven't done for the last 10 years: I went to the football stadium to watch the football game LASK Linz vs. SV Ried. The football game itself was quite nice to watch, but the goals were missing: the game ended with a goal in the 90th minute. But what was way more interesting was to observe all the people around me. So many "experts", who exactly know what to do, tactical geniuses, many of them drinking beer, combined with just stupid "jokes", homophobic rants, and a certain selfrighteousness. Probably that's why I've never been interested in going to the football stadium.

Thanks to René for this wonderful screenshot!

tpp has been heavily refactored in the past few days. Right now, still some features need to be reimplemented that used to be in the latest released version (1.1.1) but aren't in the refactored (partially rewritten) version. One feature that was in the old version but isn't the latest version is LaTeX support, the possibility to convert tpp slides to LaTeX source files that can be translated to DVI or PDF files via latex or pdflatex.

Now the question to my readers: what export formats would you recommend? If LaTeX, which package? I would like to use LaTeX packages that are delivered by default with popular ΤεΧ distributions like teTeX, pdflatex shouldn't have any problems with it, landscape format should work correctly, and it should be easy to generate programmatically. If an XML-based solution, is it transformable to HTML and/or PDF? I would really appreciate your input if you have any more insight or experience into other presentation formats.

According to Telepolis, the observers of OSCE described the voting processes in the United States "sub-standard": they had less access than in Kazakhstan, they were not allowed to get close to the ballot boxes, and the electronic voting machines were less secure than in Venezuela. Oh, and in Ohio, where the election is most likely to be decided, none of the observers weren't even let into the polling station. Democracy-wise, a sad day for the United States. But: everyone gets what he deserves. And: every man is the architect of his own fortune. When the US americans want a bad economy, more war, more international isolation and less civil rights, let them have fun with it.

One year "AK's weblog", that is 279 postings in 366 days (~ 0.76 postings per day), lots of downtimes, changing from one blog software (b2) to another one (WordPress), and (mostly) useless information that still a few people seem to be interested in.

Today, I got my last birthday present for this year: finally, my aunt managed to come to Linz and celebrate my birthday. As always, I expect to get a very original birthday present from her. And this time, it was definitely one of the best presents that I ever got before: Schott's Original Miscellany (actually, I got the German translation, "Schotts Sammelsurium"). This is nothing but a book containing more or less useful knowledge, collected by Ben Schott, and englishman who seems to have way too much time.

What is so special about this book is first of all how it looks: a very nice binding, with wonderful fonts, and also wonderful fonts inside. Then the content itself: it contains a lot of interesting and funny stuff, like how to adjust one's bow tie, which ice thicknesses are able to wear which weights, the different types of sushi and what kind of food is used for them, the nine mortal sins, the correct way through the labyrinth of Hampton Court, the free masons' grades, or the mysterious deaths of some Burmesian kings, and many, many more things.

Especially the last thing is really funny: Nandabayin for example laughed to death, when an Italian merchant told him that Venice was a free state without a king, in the year 1599. Hilarious.

Why are today's mobile phones able to take pictures, send around multimedia mesages, record sounds, play midi and MP3 files as ringtones, and connect to the internet, even with IPv6 (when the mobile phone provider supports it)? Why are they able to synchronize their calendar directly with Outlook Express, and why can't they simply set the correct time when we switch from summer time to winter time? AFAIK there are hardly any mobile phones that honor the time information that it gets from the base station (the Nokia 6310i seems to be one of them), and the time information doesn't even seem to be set to the correct hour. That really sucks. So much advanced and fancy technology around, but in the last 4 bis 5 years when mobile phones became ubiquitous in Austria, none of the mobile phone providers or phone manufacturers were able to solve the most basic real world problems.